I do these quiet hunts, like a nimble arctic fox through a snow bank, looking for the source of the quaking. This well of hurt that shakes my perfectly average days and floods doubt through the extraordinary ones.

I think it must not be January. I was just born then. Still new to this peak I’d hiked. I didn’t care much for the advances of others, I wasn’t sure how to make room in a life I’d crammed so full.

February goes without saying. So much of what I can’t leave behind I sourced there. Phantom fingers wrapped around my ankle, these skeletons pulled from their graves to drag behind me wherever I go like a haunting ball and chain.

But February quickly bled into March. Not an easy month, mind you. My heart raced for more of those 30 days than not. But the ending was a landslide.

A landslide into April which ferried me pleasantly into May. The beautiful pine trees and unmatched mornings of May. May was my big bang and I’ve been living in the consummate universe it created ever since.

And so I look for the source of my frenzy. The one that catastrophizes each unsuspecting moment. The one that plants fear in the garden I’ve been tending the whole year. The one that threatens a blight, the one that promises famine, the one that makes me want to blip out of existence before it can all be taken away.

I’ve never had something that I loved so much it terrified me. I’ve never faced a future so inviting I feared the invitation being rescinded. I’ve never had something that I missed so entirely when it wasn’t around. And I guess I just have to make myself comfortable with the accompaniments of big love. How I could have ever thought they’d be lower stakes is beyond me.

Now that I’ve stopped searching, I wonder if it might’ve been January, when I was listening to Dancing With Your Ghost with you on my mind as the first snow fell.